Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Laske on dialectic, development and kennilingus

In this IPS post is a link to Foreman's interview with Laske. I posted a few comments thereafter. Picking up where I left off:

Developmental theories are "strictly a social theory that says very little about development" (10:10).

"I don't really care about CDF and what
it says about people that much. That's developmental theory and as you
know I have doubts that these developments really happen and it what
sense they happen" (24:30).

“You cannot access dialectical thinking
if you do not practice it yourself” (38:40).

Prior to that he discussed
the 4 phases of such thinking. The first is being able to contextualize a
situation structurally. The second is seeing it as a process that
includes both presence and absence. The third is seeing the
relationships therein, how both identity and difference interplay. The
fourth is how the first three lead to transformation.

Foreman returns to the question of
development as a social theory, noting that there are hundreds of models
that report a similar structure to our biological, neurological and
psychological makeup. So how then can development just be a social
construct? Laske answers that indeed there is a biological basis for
formal operating thinking, and that once we as a race attain to it we
will of course see such consistent structures. He relates this to the
first phase of dialectical thinking. These theories know little of the
other phases noted above (44:00).

Therefore such developmental models,
enacting the formop or perhaps first stage of dialectical thinking,
unconsciously support the societal control structure inherent to that
level, i.e., the capitalist paradigm with its command-and-control
hierarchical structures. Which of course also play out in structural
developmental models (47:00).

I'd add that these later forms of
dialectical thinking are what we see in much poststructuralist thinking,
not to be confused with postmodernism per se. And that the
developmental structuralists, caught in their own unconscious social
constructions, can only interpret that as some sort of relativism and
pluralism (green meme), since they themselves have not advanced into the
other phases of this sort of dialectic. As someone once said, “the way
out of postmodernism is through it” and these developmental
structuralists have yet to go through it.

He relates this to the AQAL model and
perspective taking, which are more classification schemes representative
of structural thinking. It is not the same as dialectical thinking
(52:00). Foreman defends AQAL as a tool that can lead to the sort of
dialectical thinking Laske is talking about and Laske agrees. But AQAL
is missing the 'you' dimension, which is about dialogue and the
relationship phase of identity and difference (57:00).